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Review Summary

For those who may have wondered if foot binding, wife beating and a crooning Hugh Jackman could fit into one movie, here’s the short answer: no. At once preposterously genteel and sadistic, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” adapted from the Lisa See novel, turns on two sets of female friends, the first in early-19th-century China, the second in modern Shanghai. What joins all four women, beyond filmmaking folly, is love, feet and the sort of extravagant misery that routinely turned movie theaters into rain forests, drenched with the tears of audiences and characters who were cinema’s ladies of perpetual suffering.
— Manohla Dargis